What if freedom was measured less by the number of projects than by the possibility of lying down without guilt? In 2021, nearly four million employees left their jobs in the United States, a sign of burnout. Between burnout, expensive rent and screens, many have the impression of running around “like headless chickens” without ever really resting.
This is the diagnosis of the philosopher Juan Evaristo Valls Boix, professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and author of
Metafísica of the pereza andEl derecho a las cosas bellas. For him, “freedom is resting comfortably, not running around like headless chickens,” he explains to ElDiario.es. Stopping is not a luxury, but a first step to resuming your life.
When work colonizes free time according to Juan Evaristo Valls Boix
Juan Evaristo Valls Boix describes a capitalism that has moved from control of the body to control of desire: it doesn’t matter where you are, as long as you think about work. Flexibility, teleworking and “passion” then serve as emotional glue.
“We have learned that in the face of crises and precariousness, passion is a solution, a shield, something with which we can live happily despite the material poverty that surrounds us. We no longer believe in it at all”, he notes.
He contrasts “necessary rest” with “free rest”. The first is the minimum pause to restart the machine, “a conservative law, designed to guarantee the longevity or sustainability of businesses and capitalist circulation”. In contrast,
“free rest has to do with the fact that we connect with our life and that we do not constantly feel expropriated from it because we have to pay the rent, work or consume. That’s the idea.”
Free rest, “holgada life” and rights to conquer
With the holgada life, Juan Evaristo Valls Boix imagines an existence where one has sufficient time, income and care to not live stuck to work. He proposes five rights: laziness, strike, retirement, city, literature. “These rights are a way of stopping, of making ourselves free by stopping. Exercising them supposes directing our resources towards the construction of the material conditions to live with pleasure”, he writes, in the tradition of Karl Marx who already linked freedom and reduction of working hours.
The pandemic has made this program less theoretical. In Spain, he points out, 41% of emancipated young people share accommodation and 48% of tenants under 30 spend an excessive part of their income on rent. “The majority of the discomforts that affect us, which we believe to be psychological and which we treat with therapy or pills, have nothing private, they have a systemic dimension,” he insists. Rent strikes, the American “great resignation” or the Chinese “Tang Ping” then become collective refusals of a never-ending race.
What rest changes in our lives, seen by Juan Evaristo
For Juan Evaristo Valls Boix, “the revolution begins when we change our desires, not when our demands are met. And this change in desire is happening.” Slowing down would then open the way to a lazy world where connections matter more than performance.